Dr. Sergiy Tymchenko will be the featured speaker for the 2014 Global Engagement Lecture sponsored by Nyack College’s Center for Scholarship and Global Engagement during the annual faculty retreat. Dr. Tymchenko will address the current situation in the Ukraine and its effects on Eastern Europe.

A citizen of the Ukraine, Dr. Tymchenko grew up in Kiev in a family that was a part of the underground Baptist church movement under the Soviet Union. He committed himself to the Lord when he was a student at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. After being discipled by Navigator missionaries, he became involved in underground evangelism and discipleship networks. He began his ministry as pastor of a Baptist church in 1985 and later received an M.Div. from Denver Seminary and a Ph.D. from the London School of Theology.

He founded and directs REALIS Christian Center in Kiev, Ukraine, which in partnership with Alliance Theological Seminary from 1996-2011, provided an education to evangelical leaders from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Georgia. More than 100 of these leaders received their M.A. in Intercultural Studies through the Research, Education, and Light Center (REALIS) campus of ATS, which was the first fully accredited seminary in the post-Soviet states. From 2002-2006, REALIS offered education in clinical psychology to 25 Christian counselors in Ukraine and in 2006, it opened the first Christian counseling clinic in Ukraine.

Dr. Tymchenko co-founded the mission society "Light of the Gospel" (which was the first indigenous mission to post-Soviet states), the Association of Missionary Evangelical Churches of Ukraine, and the Center for Leadership Development. Dr. Tymchenko is also a member of the IFES International Executive Committee and the Lausanne-Orthodox Initiative Consultation Group.

Together with other evangelical, Ukrainian Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic leaders, he was actively involved in providing Christian support to the Ukrainian people’s political protests in 2004 and 2013-2014, known, respectively, as the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan.

Dr. Tymchenko has taught at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Donetsk Christian University, the North Caucasus Bible Institute, and the Eastern-European Seminary for the Education of Leaders.